@phdthesis{Schmitz2008,
  author    = {Schmitz, Michaela},
  title     = {The perception of clauses in 6- and 8-month-old German-learning infants : influence of pause duration and the natural pause hierarchy},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-29078},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2008},
  abstract  = {The present dissertation focuses on the question whether and under which conditions infants recognise clauses in fluent speech and the role a prosodic marker such as a pause may have in the segmentation process. In the speech signal, syntactic clauses often coincide with intonational phrases (IPhs) (Nespor \& Vogel, 1986, p. 190), the boundaries of which are marked by changes in fundamental frequency (e.g., Price, Ostendorf, Shattuck-Hufnagel \& Fong, 1991), lengthening of the final syllable (e.g., Cooper \& Paccia-Cooper, 1980) and the occurrence of a pause (Nespor \& Vogel, 1986, p. 188). Thus, IPhs seem to be reliably marked in the speech stream and infants may use these cues to recognise them. Furthermore, corpus studies on the occurrence and distribution of pauses have revealed that there is a strong correlation between the duration of a pause and the type of boundary it marks (e.g., Butcher, 1981, for German). Pauses between words are either non-existent or short, pauses between phrases are a bit longer, and pauses between clauses and at sentence boundaries further increase in duration. This suggests the existence of a natural pause hierarchy that complements the prosodic hierarchy described by Nespor and Vogel (1986). These hierarchies on the side of the speech signal correspond to the syntactic hierarchy of a language. In the present study, five experiments using the Headturn preference paradigm (Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Cassidy, Druss \& Kennedy, 1987) were conducted to investigate German-learning 6- and 8-month-olds' use of pauses to recognise clauses in the signal and their sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy. Previous studies on English-learning infants' recognition of clauses (Hirsh-Pasek et al., 1987; Nazzi, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk \& Jusczyk, 2000) have found that infants as young as 6 months recognise clauses in fluent speech. Recently, Seidl and colleagues have begun to investigate the status the pause may have in this process (Seidl, 2007; Johnson \& Seidl, 2008; Seidl \& Cristi{\`a}, 2008). However, none of these studies investigated infants' sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy and especially the sensitivity to the correlation between pause durations and the respective within-sentence clause boundaries / sentence boundaries. To address these questions highly controlled stimuli were used. In all five experiments the stimuli were sentences consisting of two IPhs which each coincided with a syntactic clause. In the first three experiments pauses were inserted either at clause and sentence boundaries or within the first clause and the sentence boundaries. The duration of the pauses varied between the experiments. The results show that German-learning 6-month-olds recognise clauses in the speech stream, but only in a condition in which the duration of the pauses conforms to the mean duration of pauses found at the respective boundaries in German. Experiments 4 and 5 explicitly addressed the question of infants' sensitivity to the natural pause hierarchy by inserting pauses at the clause and sentence boundaries only. Their durations were either conforming to the natural pause hierarchy or were being reversed. The results of these experiments provide evidence that 8-, but not 6-month-olds seem to be sensitive to the correlation of the duration of pauses and the type of boundary they demarcate. The present study provides first evidence that infants not only use pauses to recognise clause and sentence boundaries, but are sensitive to the duration and distribution of pauses in their native language as reflected in the natural pause hierarchy.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{RenHoehle2022,
  author    = {Ren, Jie and H{\"o}hle, Barbara},
  title     = {The interplay between language acquisition and cognitive development},
  series = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal},
  volume    = {67},
  journal   = {Infant behavior \& development : an international and interdisciplinary journal},
  publisher = {Elsevier Science},
  address   = {Amsterdam},
  issn      = {0163-6383},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101718},
  pages     = {3},
  year      = {2022},
  language  = {en}
}
@misc{Meinhardt2010,
  type      = {Master Thesis},
  author    = {Meinhardt, Miriam},
  title     = {Der Einfluss der Informationsstruktur auf das Verst{\"a}ndnis von Aktiv- und Passivs{\"a}tzen im ungest{\"o}rten Spracherwerb},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-59563},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2010},
  abstract  = {Kinder erwerben Passivstrukturen sp{\"a}ter als die meisten anderen syntaktischen Strukturen. Die vorliegende Studie besch{\"a}ftigt sich mit der Frage, ob dies auf informationsstrukturelle Faktoren zur{\"u}ckzuf{\"u}hren sein k{\"o}nnte. Probleme beim Erwerb von Passivs{\"a}tzen wurden in vorhergehenden Studien unter anderem auf ihre geringe Inputfrequenz oder bestimmte syntaktische Charakteristika von Passivs{\"a}tzen zur{\"u}ckgef{\"u}hrt. Jedoch konnte bisher keiner dieser Ans{\"a}tze ihr sp{\"a}tes Erwerbsalter umfassend erkl{\"a}ren. W{\"a}hrend Aktivs{\"a}tze, die kanonische, unmarkierte Satzstruktur im Deutschen, in jeglichem Diskurskontext verwendet werden k{\"o}nnen, werden Passivs{\"a}tze fast ausschließlich dann verwendet, wenn der Patiens der beschriebenen Handlung schon vorerw{\"a}hnt war und/ oder als Topik eines Satzes fungieren soll. Passivs{\"a}tze sind also nicht in jedem Kontext informationsstrukturell ad{\"a}quat. Kinder haben im Gegensatz zu Erwachsenen aufgrund ihrer geringeren syntaktischen F{\"a}higkeiten Probleme, S{\"a}tze zu verarbeiten, die nicht in einem ad{\"a}quaten Kontext stehen. Der Einfluss dieser Kontextbedingungen auf das Satzverst{\"a}ndnis wurde in der vorliegenden Studie bei deutschsprachigen Kindern untersucht. Kindern zwischen 3;0 und 4;11 Jahren wurden Aktiv- oder Passivs{\"a}tze pr{\"a}sentiert, denen informationsstrukturell ad{\"a}quate, inad{\"a}quate oder neutrale Kontexts{\"a}tze vorangingen. Wie erwartet verstanden die Kinder Aktivs{\"a}tze besser als Passivs{\"a}tze und 4-j{\"a}hrige Kinder zeigten bessere Leistungen als 3-j{\"a}hrige. Es gab Tendenzen, dass die 3-j{\"a}hrigen Kinder Passivs{\"a}tze besser, aber Aktivs{\"a}tze schlechter verstanden, wenn ihr Subjekt vorerw{\"a}hnt wurde. Statistisch signifikante Kontexteffekte fanden sich jedoch im Gegensatz zu einer vergleichbaren Studie mit englischsprachigen Kindern (Gourley und Catlin, 1978) in keiner Testbedingung. Außerdem zeigte sich, dass die Kinder Passivs{\"a}tze insgesamt besser und Aktivs{\"a}tze insgesamt schlechter verstanden als englischsprachige Kinder in anderen Studien. Die Ergebnisse werden mit dem Competition Modell (Mac Whinney und Bates, 1987) und einer Sprachverarbeitungstheorie von Stromswold (2002) erkl{\"a}rt. Außerdem wird diskutiert, warum die deutschsprachigen Kinder in der vorliegenden Studie andere Sprachverst{\"a}ndnisleistungen zeigten als englischsprachige Kinder.},
  language  = {de}
}